March 2026 Update

📈📉 Market Update: Stepwise, down

Disclaimer: Not financial advice.

January’s Monthly Closes:

BTC: -14.8% , ETH: -19.9% , SOL: -20.1% SUI: -21.6%

Markets-wise this month was “more of the same” bear market downtrend, starting with a spicy liquidation event on Feb 5th. I am reminded that bear markets are not a steady march downwards, but rather a staircase. In 2022 it was largely event-driven, like the collapse of Terra, Three Arrows, FTX. This time, there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the timing of some of these downward moves, other than breaking key support levels.

At H2O Nodes we’re just sitting back and exercising patience. We know that this too, shall end. Not taking any trades, not making any moves. What is hard to stomach, though, is the effect of the market on some of our infrastructure customers, who are being squeezed and doing all they can to save costs. We’re sympathetic, but it hurts to lose customers we gained a matter of months ago, as they pivot towards running their own validators.

✅ Live on Mainnet: Canton & Arcium

We’re live on Canton and Arcium! Our mainnet validators are alive and well. Judging by the amount of outreach I got following our Canton announcement, word is starting to spread about the growth of this network. What’s lesser known, however, is that validator “liveness rewards” will cease in the next months, putting more economic emphasize on apps’ ability to produce fees.

📊 The Solana Staking Index

Alongside Marinade we’ve help launch the Solana Staking Index, an index of Solana’s staking APY based on verifiable on-chain data. This will unlock use cases like interest rate swaps, hedging, and perps for trading Solana's yield. This was one of the use cases that originally got me thinking about RevTec, although is still unsolved: validators being able to hedge against falling block rewards. This index is just the first step toward more products, but I like the direction this is going in.

🟣 RevTec, Launching Soon (TM)

Finishing touches are going into RevTec as we speak, with the audit from Accretion to begin next week. After 9 months of work, we are finally a few weeks out from mainnet launch. Then, it’s up to our friends at Exponent Finance to help our product take its next step.

The economic environment is still interesting: Block rewards continue to remain somewhat elevated, while the “scheduler wars” rage on.

I gave a presentation a few days ago for the Solana validator community call, outlining trends in REV production and spot volume trading. It seems memecoin trading may not be dead, after all. In any case, those looking to make a long trade on REV will be glad that RevTec will be launching in an environment where REV production is still subdued enough to long cheaply, but high enough to give some hope of light at the end of the tunnel.

Keep trucking through the bear market, WAGMI to the other side.

-Max Sherwood, H2O Nodes Co-founder